All Things Are One Thing

No longer what I could call a 'politically active' guy, I sometimes feel either confused or guilty about this. My anarchistic values remain more-or-less intact. My faith and interest in what largely passes for revolutionary activity, organizing, agitation or activism (call it what you will) is largely gone. Against the banality of what tends to pass for 'the struggle' in the West, and to be honest out of exhaustion and fear, I chose withdrawl over mediocrity. Instead of selling out my values and becoming a mediocre liberal out of political expediency I felt that to withdraw from the overt aspects of the social struggle would be more dignified. I threw myself into literature, athletics, combatives, meditation - the very things which my previously obsessive focus on political activity kept me from for a decade.

A number of my friends, mostly as they grew older, made a similar move as myself, not always deliberately and not always for the same reasons. My old comrade P. is one of these although I think maybe because he is a father he has a little more of himself remaining in the game than me. Anyways, P. has been digging into a collection of interviews with Allen Ginsberg and has been struck with how A.G. came to an engagement with politics through the realizations which he had first through drugs and then, increasingly, Buddhist meditation. The way P. explains it, it all seems logical to me. The premise that all things are one thing can certainly elicit certain commitments and any number of further investigations whci may take on a social, political and religious character.

Anyways, it is in this frame of mind that I found out this week that an old friend has been arrested in the U.S.A. and subpoenaed to a Grand Jury investigating the radical earth and animal liberation movements that have been a persistent bane to certain economic and legal bodies in that country.

If you are interested check out www.freedarren.org and maybe write him a letter or something. He is a decent man.